OnDead? Rumours that OnLive is to close as early as by the end of today

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OnDead? Rumours that OnLive is to close as early as by the end of today

This is going to throw up big barriers for other cloud gaming services, especially those that don't operate solely by a subscription service. While Valve could potentially do the same thing with Steam tomorrow, this is unlikely as they are printing money, while OnLive were seemingly haemorrhaging it.

Its not a business model I'll be sad to see the back of, nor one in which I was invested. I had an account, but only to marvel at what is still an impressive technical accomplishment.

Not out of some sort of hatred for the company or anything, but I hope it is true.

The concept behind Onlive terrifies me.
-Input lag that (unless someone finds a way to send data faster than the speed of light aka scifi quantum entanglement maybe in a hundred years) will always remain :Horror as a gamer.
-Closed system (console style walled garden) : Horror as a PC gamer.
-even less control and ownership of your games : Horror as a consumer.

What it could do if this were to catch on... I don't even want to think about it.

I get that it can be nice for those with shitbad computers (and a great ISP with no data cap) to have a way to play games , be it in a very gimped unresponsive way, but you've all seen how the PR monkeys and me too 'journalists' tried to pass it off as the "future of gaming"

Better than it dies early and quietly than be a potential path for pc gaming to take.

Oh...kay? So the service may be continuing, but with a completely new company? That seems strange.

Buyout with some staff lost in the process?

Originally Posted by Mohorovicic

No bigger than what laws of physics have already thrown

That's Digital Foundry's shitty 2009 rhetoric. OnLive is a scam! It can't work because of the speed of light!
Turns out it works just fine, with less latency than the fucking TVs it's used on. All through the magic of having local ISPs hosting the servers.

OnLive's biggest problem is that it's in America. Can't wait for the first OnLive on Google Fiber reports.

I can't think of anything that would surprise me less than OnLive going belly up. It's just a terrible idea all around. Who are they appealing to? People who want to play PC games, but don't want to own a gaming PC?

"What were we talking about? Pegasuses, pegasii, that's horses with wings. This motherf*cker got a sword that talks to him. Motherf*cker live in places that don't exist, it comes with a map. My God."

Ahhh "The unspecified source". Allowing you to start rumours without any of those pesky libel charges getting in the way. I'll wait until I hear official word from someone whose willing to give their name before I declare the company dead. Though admittedly I wouldn't be overly surprised or paticularly sad if they did pop their clogs.

@Sirkicksalot

Have you used Onlive? Even when it's playable it really really doesn't compare to running it off your computer. Maybe if it had been launched as a Lovefilm Instant style flat fee for unlimited game rentals in a month then I might have used it. But paying full price to stream a game? Fuck no. As a rental or demo service it could have worked but not in its current form.

Last edited by Bhazor; 17-08-2012 at 09:06 PM.

“People will kill you over time, and how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like “be realistic”
― Dylan Moran

Have you used Onlive? Even when it's playable it really really doesn't compare to running it off your computer. Maybe if it had been launched as a Lovefilm Instant style flat fee for unlimited game rentals in a month then I might have used it. But paying full price to stream a game? Fuck no. As a rental or demo service it could have worked but not in its current form.

I am aware of its limitations. The technology works. If their business model was shitty, well, that's another matter.

That's Digital Foundry's shitty 2009 rhetoric. OnLive is a scam! It can't work because of the speed of light!
Turns out it works just fine, with less latency than the fucking TVs it's used on. All through the magic of having local ISPs hosting the servers.

OnLive's biggest problem is that it's in America. Can't wait for the first OnLive on Google Fiber reports.

So naive,server hosting quality/latency/packet loss has declined in the last 10 years, not improved.
Wwith publishers forcing people to use the hosting companies they make deals with for profit (hosts who in turn cut costs for profit).
We can't even get a decent dedi in gaming these days and you are assuming that publishers/onlive will provide these streaming parks with good connections (no loss, no choke, high bitrate streaming) close enough to everyone to have negligable latency (has to be really fucking close then).

LCD tvs and monitors are often already hopelessly laggy, adding even more to that makes things entirely unplayable.

Google fiber is no different than DSL latency wise, you confuse bandwidth with the time it takes for data to travel along a network cable.
You'll get an added 12 ms of input lag per 100km you are seperated from an onlive server park. (and an extra however much ms for encoding the stream).

A :On a good monitor at a high framerate you are currently looking at maybe 40-60 ms of input lag. (standard until the LCD era)
B : On a bad monitor with low framerate and a shitty engine that can be 150-200 ms
(what most peasants these days settle for)

Using onlive would in a best case scenario already double your inpug lag in case A (so over 100 ms)... add vsync or scenario B or don't be lucky enough to live really close to a server park and you are going to get ridonculous amounts of input lag.

Best case scenario also relies on onlive to stream at 60 fps or higher and at your monitor's native resolution, if your monitor has to scale the image that adds a significant amount of extra latency before it gets displayed.

To believe Onlive would be good (or even just not terrible) you have to be incredibly optimistic, naive AND selfish (fuck people who live in semi remote areas, fuck eastern europe and every country too poor to get a server park nearby, am I right?)

Oh and I forgot: even if a server park is close and all the best case things mentioned above somehow happen: you are still at the mercy of EVERY single ISP between you and the server park routing the data between you and onlive, if even one of them has a lot of packet loss (quite common, ask people who had to deal with telia) then you are fucked.